Excerpt from Paul LaViolette's 1983 Ph.D. dissertation

From Chapter 4, Section 4.7 "Planetary Evidence"

4.7.3 Lunar Evidence of Past Solar Activity

The Remarkable Glazed Rock Patches on the
Moon. One of the most amazing
discoveries of the Apollo 11 manned landing on the Moon was that
small lunar craters measuring between 20 cm and 1.5 meters
across frequently contain at their bottoms lumps of soil whose
upper surfaces are coated with a glassy glaze (Gold, 1969). The
glassy patches that were photographed at close range by Apollo
astronauts range in size from 0.5 - 10 mm. According
to Gold (p. 1345):

The glazed areas are clearly concentrated
toward the top surfaces of protuberances, although they exist
also on some sides. Points and edges appear to be strongly
favored for the glazing process. In some cases, droplets appear
to have run down an inclined surface for a few millimeters and
congealed there.

Eliminating a variety of
possible alternate explanations, such as meteorite impacts, Gold
concludes that these features were formed by intense radiative
heating of the lunar surface by the Sun. Temperatures at crater
bottoms typically being 10 - 20% higher than on flat ground,
such regions would have been the first to melt. He points out
that this event would have had to have occurred within the last
30,000 years in order to account for the absence of significant
micrometeorite erosion. He estimates that the solar luminosity
would have had to increase by 100 fold for 10 to 100 seconds
in order to produce the observed glazing effects, and suggests
that this luminosity increase may have occurred in the form of
a very large solar flare or as a nova-like outburst. He proposes
that either the Sun spontaneously engages in such outbursts on
rare occasions (every few tens of thousands of years) or else
something falling into the Sun happened to trigger the proposed
eruption, e.g., the infall of a large cometary body having a
mass of about 3 X 1021
grams and a diameter of about 100 km.

Gold's conclusion that the Sun has engaged in extremely
energetic activity within the last 30,000 years parallels the
conclusion that I have reached independently in this study on
the basis of an entirely different set of data. As is suggested
in Section 3.3.2, about 12,000 - 14,000 years ago the Sun temporarily
may have become a T Tauri-like star due to the accretion
of nebular material. Short-period flare-like outbursts
lasting on the order of 100 - 104
seconds and having energies of the order of 1034 ergs are typical of T Tauri stars; see
Section 3.3.2 (p. 192). However, for the outburst proposed
by Gold, a total energy of 1037
ergs (1000 times greater) would be required. Such a large outburst
would be more on the scale of a nova than a flare. T Tauri
stars are observed to change their luminosity in an erratic manner
by 20 fold or more, but it is not certain whether this effect
is due to variations in the optical depth of obscuring dust or
to variations in the intrinsic output of the star.

Another possibility is that the Moon's surface
was heated by solar wind particles, rather than by electromagnetic
wave radiation. About half of the energy of a solar flare is
normally emitted in the form of solar wind protons. If such a
particle blast from a very large solar flare were to become magnetically
trapped in the Earth's magnetopause tail, very high particle
densities could become temporarily achieved. If then the Moon
happened to be transiting through this energetic region, its
surface could have become considerably scorched. Alternatively,
it is also possible that both the Earth and Moon encountered
a region of enhanced solar flare particle density, the remnant
of a major prominence or "fireball" thrown out by the
Sun. In such a case the interplanetary magnetic field bound up
with the particle blast wave could have acted as a magnetic bottle
retarding the dispersal of this region of high particle density
as it journeyed from the Sun.

Morgan, Laul, Ganapathy, and Anders (1971)
have analyzed the glassy coating and crystalline interior of
one lunar rock and find that the coating is enriched in a number
or rare earth elements and alkali metals including Ir and Au.
They conclude that the glass has been contaminated by a mixture
of meteoric material with lunar soil. They suggest that the glassy
material represents molten material splashed from a nearby meteoritic
impact and that it was not produced by in situ melting due to
radiative heating, as Gold has suggested.

However, the geochemical results reported by
Morgan et al. could be interpreted differently. If at the time
of radiative or solar wind heating the surface of the Moon had
been covered by a fine deposit of micron and submicron-sized
particles of cosmic dust, this material would have become fused
into the underlying rock when melting occurred. This scenario
is compatible with the proposal made earlier in this study (Chapter
3, Section 3.3.2) that the solar system was filled with unusually
high concentrations of cosmic dust at the time of enhanced solar
activity. In addition, the results of the glacial ice dust tests
(Chapter 12), which indicate high cosmic dust deposition rates
at the end of the Wisconsin ice age, also support this interpretation.

The Lunar Record of Past Solar Flare Activity. Solar flare tracks left in the glassy surfaces
of lunar micrometeorite craters provide a record of past solar
flare activity. Assuming that the cratering rate has remained
relatively constant for the past 2 X 104 years, Zook, Hartung, and Storzer (1977) conclude
that solar flare activity must have been about 50 fold higher
about 16,000 years ago. The activity curve which they have derived
is shown in Figure 4.5. If the cratering rate was higher
prior to 10,000 BP, as the Galactic Explosion Hypothesis suggests
[dissertation's hypothesis], then the solar flare activity change
presented in this diagram would be underestimated. The peak at
16,000 BP would then be expected to increase and shift to a more
recent date. Thus this data would be compatible with the solar
outburst date of 14,000 calendar years BP (12,000 C-14 years
BP) established on the basis of geological evidence; see Part
III of dissertation.*

It is significant that the
conclusion reached by Zook et al. on the basis of lunar rock
studies parallels that which I independently arrived at on the
basis of the analysis of glacial ice dust and theoretical considerations
regarding the response of the Sun to the accretion of elevated
amounts of nebular material. Zook et al. (1977, p. 120)
speculate that the elevated solar flare activity around 16,000
BP may somehow have been associated with the retreat of the continental
ice sheets at the end of the last glaciation, although they are
not able to suggest a mechanism by which terrestrial temperature
would correlate with solar flare activity. The GEH suggests such
a mechanism, namely the influx of nebular material into the Solar
System could have caused terrestrial heating through an interplanetary
greenhouse effect and also could have activated the Sun through
material accretion; see Section 3.3.2 (pp. 185, 194) and Subsection
3.3.4 (p. 211).

It should be pointed out that the occurrence
of a very brief, very intense heating of the lunar and terrestrial
environment at the end of the Last Ice Age (either by a radiative
outburst or by an outburst of solar wind particles) may be easily
tested by conducting a detailed stratigraphic analysis of glacial
ice cores. If this scenario is correct, a melt feature should
be present in the ice cores discussed in Chapter 8. Such a feature
would most easily be distinguished in Antarctic cores, where
melt features are normally found to be quite rare. Also, if a
major solar outburst had occurred, it would probably have left
a signature such as a high nitrate concentration, possibly in
association with an enhancement of Be-10 concentration; refer
to Section 8.4 (p. 432) and Section 7.2 (p. 392).

___________________

*As of the time of this update (10/07), I have adopted the date
12,950 calendar years b2k. (11,000 C-14 years B.P.) as the climax
of this megafaunal extinction. PAL